Manal Al Dowayan

FIELD MEETING October 27th, 2014 New York City

Manal Al Dowayan’s FIELD MEETING presentation focused on her ongoing research-based art projects exploring inclusion, memory, policy, and archives. She spoke about her recent work, Crash, which examines the deaths of Saudi Arabian female teachers over the past 25 years due to car and bus accidents on roads. She asks, “what does it mean to actively erase a group of people from collective memory?” Manal also reviewed the importance of experimental spaces, allowing for such exploratory projects to manifest, and the debates that unfolded once her works were shown in both exhibition, and workshop formats.

Manal Al Dowayan is a conceptual artist whose work revolves around the ideas of active forgetting, modern archiving, and collective memory. She has worked with black and white photography, neon, large-scale installations and participatory art. Past residencies include: The Delfina Foundation in London, The Town House Gallery in Cairo, and Mathaf Project Space in Doha. Al Dowayan has been featured at exhibitions such as Prospect New Orleans 2014, Noorderlicht Festival in Groningen, Netherlands 2011, collateral exhibitions at the Venice Biennial in 2011 and 2009, the Berlin Biennial in 2010, and Contemporary Istanbul in 2010. Her works have been collected by the British Museum, LA County Museum, Mathaf Museum of Modern Arab Art. Al Dowayan was born and raised in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and holds a Master’s degree in Systems Analysis and Design. She worked as the Creative Director of the Saudi Arabian oil company for ten years before becoming a full-time artist. Represented by Cuadro Gallery in Dubai, she currently lives and works between her native Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, UAE.

Manal Al Dowayan’s participation in FIELD MEETING was partially supported by ArteEast

Manal Al Dowayan, research for Crash, 2014. Image Courtesy of the artist.